No Wonder Scientists Ask Statisticians to Cook the Data

When statisticians responded to a survey about the kinds of requests they received from biomedical scientists, a number of them reported “inappropriate requests” like throwing out or ignoring inconvenient data points and otherwise finding ways to make things look like the scientist got a desired result, rather than the truth. The survey was created by an epidemiologist at NYU, who, according to a story in the CBC, was shocked when a statistician told him of frequent requests to help cook the books. The statisticians didn’t have to say whether they accepted any of these requests.